Making the Future Tangible

(This is the second in a series of posts about the value of speculation. In the first post, I argued that imagination isn’t a luxury — it’s operational strategy. In an era of rapid change, your team’s capacity to speculate with intent is what keeps innovation alive. You can read that post here.)

When people asked me what design fiction looks like in practice, one of the first things I point to is a project we created years ago called TBD Catalog.

On the surface, it looked like an ordinary consumer catalog — the kind you’d find in your mailbox. Flip through the pages, though, and you’d encounter products and services that don’t yet exist: dog-walking drones, poncho’s that confused surveillance cameras, Pillsbury 3D food printers…

(We’ve also done a speculative futures edition of the IKEA catalog, another favorite for its ubiquitous brand and its very particular design language.)

Both of these were playful to be sure — but as importantly, they we’re also strategic. By holding something that felt like it had arrived from a near future, readers didn’t just think about abstract possibilities — they reacted to them. They debated whether they’d ever use that product, worried about its implications, or laughed at its absurdity. The catalog gave them a way to experience tomorrow in the language of today.

Let me give you another, more recent example.

Late last year, in preparation for a policy workshop on AI, I ran my own internal speculative design exercise to create an artifact from an AI future. I did this in the form of a newspaper.

Yup. A newspaper, from a future in which AI was as normal, ordinary, and everyday as breakfast.

A newspaper from an AI future — Applied Intelligence Issue N°001

I called it “Applied Intelligence” with the subheadline “Tomorrow’s News Today”.

(You can forgive the anachronism of a newspaper. It was deliberate. I wanted something that felt tangible and real, but also a bit out of time — like the future itself. Plus, my dad was a newspaper man and I spent plenty of time in the editorial offices so its in my blood. Plus, for practical reasons the layout and structure of a newspaper is a great way to organize a lot of information quickly, to have something that has a feel to it, and something that can travel in the world of atoms easier than a PowerPoint deck.)

The newspaper included headlines, articles, ads, and op-eds that imagined how AI might reshape everyday life. It wasn’t a prediction. It was a provocation. A way to make the future feel real enough to provide a touchstone that set a mood and activated the imagination. A newspaper doesn’t need to serve as a product roadmap — it need only trace the contours of a possible world and imply the hopes and fears, questions and concerns, that such a world might evoke.

That’s the essence of speculative prototyping: making the future tangible so it can be debated, evaluated, and shaped. I am not talking about speculating in a PowerPoint deck. This is not about abstract scenario buried in a report. It’s about making an artifact that feels real enough to provoke a reaction.

Newspaper. Little functional prototypes made of software and hardware. Snapshots of the contours of a service. An HR manual from a future where AI is part of the team. A product brochure for a service that uses AI to enhance human creativity. A video ad for a world where AI is as common as smartphones.

We’ve done this in other forms too.

One favorite?

Your organization’s annual report — but as imagined in some speculative future.

The OMATA Annual Report from the Future looked back on a product company and brand from its success condition four years hence, creating a horizon for our decisions in the present.

These aren’t gimmicks. They aren’t just fanciful ideas. These kinds of speculative futures artifacts are very much tools. In their making and creation they imbue teams, leadership, and stakeholders with effervescent energy and tap into creative reserves that are often dormant in the day-to-day grind.

They provide concrete alignment around possible futures.

They surface questions no one thought to ask, risks no one anticipated, and opportunities that didn’t show up on the roadmap — or were seen as too weird to consider.

There was a day though, as I reminded you just the other day, that jogging shoes were unheard of and the Florsheim Shoe people poo-poo’d the idea. There was a day when no one thought that wheels on luggage made any sense at all, and the buyers at Macy’s — then the largest department store in the world — didn’t see the value in them. There was a day when people dove over or scissor-kicked over the high jump bar, until an iconoclast named Dick Fosbury decided to go over the high bar backwards at the 1968 Olympics. (I like to think his friends in the pit were just as surprised as the thousands of spectators in the stands.)

Speculative design doesn’t replace traditional product development. It complements it. It stretches the imagination just far enough to expose new paths — some to pursue, some to avoid. And it does so in a way that engages both heart and mind.

That’s what I’ve specialized in building: the processes, the artifacts, the workshops that help teams rehearse the future rather than wait for it. I’ve led groups through these speculative prototypes, and every time the same thing happens: creative energy is unlocked, alignment forms, and the conversation shifts from abstract to concrete.

This is what makes product teams stronger. When they can hold a piece of the future in their hands — even if it’s fictional — they gain a new ability to navigate uncertainty. They stop reacting and start rehearsing. They stop waiting for the future to arrive and begin inventing it.

In the next post, I’ll share how you can build a team inside your organization to do this consistently: a dedicated speculative studio that produces artifacts, not just decks. That’s the kind of team I know how to assemble and lead — and when you have one, your organizational imagination becomes pure competitive advantage.